For Taylor Swift fans, Monday morning brought a whiplash-inducing pair of announcements: news of a world tour, and a defensive statement from Spotify saying that Ms. Swift had removed all of her music from the service.
The world tour for Ms. Swift’s latest album, “1989,” will start on May 20 in Bossier City, La., and wind through North America and Europe over the summer and fall before going to Australia in December, according to Ms. Swift’s website. Among the other dates is July 11, set aside for MetLife Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J. (There is a conspicuous absence of other shows around that date, a sign that she may add more New York-area concerts.)
Her opening acts will include Vance Joy and Shawn Mendes.
But the news that set tongues wagging in the music business was that Ms. Swift’s label, Big Machine, had ordered Spotify, the subscription streaming service, to remove all of her songs from the service in an effort drive up sales of her albums and songs.
This was not totally a surprise. Along with a handful of other major acts like Adele, Coldplay and Beyoncé, Ms. Swift has often withheld her music from Spotify for a limited time after its release, adding her albums only after a “window” of exclusivity for retailers that sell downloads and CDs, which yield much higher royalty rates. (They can also contribute to big opening-week sales numbers that are a bragging right in the industry.) Ms. Swift’s most recent album, “1989,” released last Monday, was no different, although Spotify did have the first single, “Shake It Off.”
Late last week, however, Big Machine asked Spotify to remove all of Ms. Swift’s music, and by Monday morning it was gone, which Spotify announced in a passive-aggressive blog post with the headline, “On Taylor Swift’s Decision to Remove Her Music From Spotify.”
The service, which has 40 million users around the world and is frequently in the position of defending its business model to artists and record companies, said in the blog post: “We hope she’ll change her mind and join us in building a new music economy that works for everyone. We believe fans should be able to listen to music wherever and whenever they want, and that artists have an absolute right to be paid for their work and protected from piracy. That’s why we pay nearly 70 percent of our revenue back to the music community.”
When asked about Spotify’s announcement, a representative of Big Machine declined to comment. But in the past, Scott Borchetta, Big Machine’s chief executive, has been an outspoken critic of Spotify and other streaming sites, calling their business model “a race to the bottom.”
With music sales over all very low this year, and Ms. Swift breaking from country radio for “1989,” initial projections for album’s first week sales were as low as 750,000 copies. But estimates rose quickly over the course of the week, and the album is now expected to sell 1.3 million copies or more, which would instantly make “1989” the biggest album released in 2014, by far.